Ruth Spellman is quietly-spoken, but her opinions are forceful. From her office overlooking London's Covent Garden, she espouses a management rhetoric that seems to be a long way from her days in the Labour Club at Cambridge.
For instance, Spellman, chief executive of the Chartered Management Institute, avers that NHS management is "broken". It seems a sweeping statement, but she reiterates the view: "We've all seen it, how badly managed the health service is now. It's broke."
Spellman endorses the new government policy of public sector cuts, but says managers will need more support as cuts are made. "We might end up with fewer, better managers," she says. "Look at the health service. There are hundreds of managers, but the leadership skill will be in looking at those managers, seeing how good they are, and working out what to do with the ones that are left."
This she regards as a task in which the CMI should be involved, together with NHS employers' body, the NHS Confederation. "You need a leadership and management strategy. You want a cadre of people coming through who have been well trained," she maintains.
Spellman has been chief executive of the CMI since 2008. The organisation has 86,000 members, about half of whom are public sector managers, from central and local government, as well as from the NHS and, interestingly, from the army and the Ministry of Defence.
A number of the CMI's private sector members will of course also be delivering services to the public sector, and Spellman says it's useful to get managers from different sectors to network together. "they have the same issues to deal with, the same expectations to meet and possibly some of the same challenges around less resource and how you gear people up to face the challenge of change."
The institute supports its members by providing them with networking opportunities, as well as examples of good management practice. "Research tells us that 60% of managers haven't been trained for what they do. They have more or less fallen into it. That's quite alarming, if you think how quickly people come up the scale to senior positions. As you go up, it's quite hard to admit what you don't know," says Spellman.
Like most women, I've had one of those zigzag careers, with children in the middle
Spellman comes from an HR background. She was chief executive of Investors in People when it was set up, and has followed what she freely describes as a "zigzag" career: "Like most women, I've had one of those zigzag careers, with children in the middle," she explains. "I've gone for the jobs that have been interesting and self-consciously tried to make changes as well. Until my mid-30s, I had worked only in the public sector and I thought that was too narrowly based to develop a management career, so I went to Coopers and Lybrand."
Working at the management consultancy was "fantastic", says Spellman. She followed that with a move to the NSPCC, at the age of 40. "The NSPCC was looking for an HR person with a business background, so it was a very good fit. We won employer of the year in 1996 and that's what I feel I brought about." After seven years at the children's charity, Spellman got a "tap on the shoulder" from the chair of Investors in People, where she became chief executive. "That was a fantastic place because I was able to use everything I'd ever done and I also felt it put HR right where it should be."
In the light of a public sector recruitment freeze and a private sector only just emerging from recession, you might think bodies like the CMI are facing a tough time, but Spellman is ambitious both personally and for her organisation. She wants to double the CMI's membership and change its constituency - at the moment, she freely admits, it comprises quite a lot of older, male members. She'd like to run a more diverse organisation.
When it comes to public sector management, Spellman is on the one hand critical of the sector bringing in too many managers from outside, rather than focusing on developing in-house managers, but on the other hand also says people should be encouraged to leapfrog between sectors.
She is clear, however, on the need to support public managers through these hard times, and the importance of techniques such as coaching and mentoring. As for work/life balance, Spellman recognises the challenge in getting that right, but says it's important to have things that help - in her case, being a member of her local operatic society.
From Flip Chart Fairy Tales
From Bubb's Blog
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